PCI 7833R replacement

[jyang72211]

I want to replace my PCI 7833R FPGA card with a newer and better FPGA and with PCIe bus if possible.  I want to make as little change to the LabVIEW code as possible, but I notice the potential changes that I have to make so far.  Are there ways to get around them?  Are there more changes that I should anticipate?

1. device change.  I assume I can change that pretty easily in the project explorer.  Any pitfall?

2. The PCI 7833R uses integer to represent floating point for its analog I/O.  Other new devices use fixed point or floating point directly, which mean I have to make a lot of code change.  Can I make the new device to uses integer for analog values? 

[Nick-C · Accepted solution]

jyang,

Our cRIO and sbRIO products use the fixed-point data type for analog input, however all R-Series PCI & PCIe devices still use raw integer data to represent analog input.

Your code changes should be very minimal if any. You'll have to add a new target to your project and add FPGA I/O, but if you give the channels the same aliases as they had on your previous target you'll just have to drop the FPGA VI & other project items (memory, FIFO, etc) under the new FPGA target and all should be well.

Remember that you can try this and compile for a different FPGA target before you even purchase the hardware. Since you can get your resource utilization and timing reports, this might be helpful in deciding which R-Series board you'd like to go with. Take a look at the KnowledgeBase titled "How Many Slices Does My FPGA Chip Have", this will give you a rough estimate of how much larger the other FPGAs are, but it doesn't include specialty resources like DSPs, BRAM, etc.

Hope this helps!

[dwisti]

Are you using the 7833R with Labview 8.5.1 or older?  The PCIe board is not supported until Labview 8.6.  There is a chart some where showing minimum software versions but I cant seem to find the link.

[jyang72211]

Using 2011